by VIKING ADULT
After all, the bond of emperor to subject is surely closer than parent to child,
more loving than child to parent. Yet while the palace minister still roamed the bardo,114
His Cloistered Eminence made a progress to Yawata and indulged in music.
There was no sign that he cared at all.
Very well. Perhaps my sorrow meant nothing to him,
but why should the palace minister’s loyal service have so slipped his mind?
And even if it did, how could he not have felt some sympathy for me?
So in the end His Cloistered Eminence cared nothing for either of us,
which for me, now, means a grave loss of face. That is my first complaint.
Then another thing: Whereas the palace minister received the province of Echizen with the assurance that it would remain in his line forever, he was no sooner gone than His Cloistered Eminence took it back again. What kind of oversight is that? That is my second complaint. In addition, when a counselor post came vacant and Fujiwara no Motomichi spoke up for it, I lent him vigorous support; but no, His Cloistered Eminence ignored me and appointed instead the regent’s son. I can make no sense of this. No doubt I sometimes get things wrong, but he could have listened to me at least this once! Motomichi is his father’s heir, after all, and he certainly has the rank. His appointment would have made perfect sense. His Cloistered Eminence’s failure to agree was extremely disappointing. That is my third complaint.
Furthermore, the rebellion that Narichika and those others cooked up at Shishi-no-tani—
this was no little whim of theirs. Oh, no, they had the cloistered emperor’s backing.
I might perhaps refrain from saying so, but given everything that my house has done for his,
I do not see how he could drop us for seven generations at least.
Besides which, I am going on seventy and probably have few enough years before me,
and he wants any trivial excuse to get rid of me even before I am dead.
No, I cannot imagine my descendants being called henceforth to serve the imperial house.
Lose a son at my advanced age
and you are a tree dead, stripped of branches.
Now that I have so little time left,
the most earnest effort of mine
could never achieve anything;
and so, as far as I am concerned,
the world can do as it pleases.”
At times he raged, at times he wept,
moving Jken to fear and pity,
even as sweat poured from his body.
No man alive could have spoken a word in answer.
Moreover, Jken belonged to the cloistered emperor’s intimate circle.
He had witnessed everything plotted at Shishi-no-tani
and, having conspired himself, knew all too well that he might at any moment be jailed.
He felt as though stroking a dragon’s beard or treading on a tiger’s tail.
But he, too, was a man of strong character, and he never lost his nerve.
He said, “You have indeed rendered signal service, time after time.
Your current irritation is easy to understand.
However, such office, rank, and recompense as have come your way should satisfy anyone.
They prove that His Cloistered Eminence appreciates the magnitude of your merit.
That some close to him nonetheless foment disorder
and that he personally supports their designs—
that is a notion encouraged only by subjects of evil intent.
People all too often wrongly believe their ears and doubt their eyes.
To give weight to the careless talk of small men
and, despite unique imperial favor, to set yourself against your sovereign—
that is frightening in both worlds, the seen and the unseen.
The mind of heaven, boundless blue,
remains wholly inscrutable,
and so, too, the imperial will.
For the low to challenge the high
is hardly a subject’s proper way.
You would do well to ponder this.
At any rate, I will now report
the substance of what you have said.”
Jken withdrew, and all present
murmured, “That was really something!
Lord Kiyomori was just furious,
and even so Jken never flinched!
No, before excusing himself
he took care to answer right back!”
Everyone was deeply impressed.
16. The Ministers Banished
Jken returned to the cloistered emperor’s residence and told him the story.
The sovereign saw that Kiyomori had right on his side. He found no reply.
On the sixteenth, Lord Kiyomori set in motion the plan he had formed.
He dismissed from office regent, chancellor, senior nobles, and privy gentlemen,
to the number of forty-three, and banished them.115
The regent he exiled to Kyushu as viceroy of Dazaifu.
“The way the world is these days,” the regent remarked, “better just to lie low.”
At Furukawa, within the bounds of Toba, he entered religion, in his thirty-fifth year.
A master of manners and protocol, he resembled, so people felt, a spotless mirror,
and for that reason he was greatly missed.
When a man condemned to distant exile then leaves the world,
he need not proceed to his assigned destination—in this case the province of Hyūga.
Instead he went no farther than Ibasama, near the provincial capital of Bizen.
Ministers had been exiled before:
Soga no Akae of the left;
Toyonari of the right;
Uona of the left; of the right,
Sugawara no Michizane;
of the left, Lord Takaakira;
of the right, Korechika—
already six precedents in all.
As to the banishment of a regent,
this, it seems, was the first time.
The son of the late Lord Motozane,
the second-rank captain Motomichi—
Lord Kiyomori’s son-in-law—
was named regent and minister.
The Ichij regent Koretada died in Emperor En’yū’s reign, in Tenroku 3, [972]
on the first of the eleventh month. His younger brother,
the Horikawa regent Kanemichi, was then still a counselor at junior second rank,
hence below the next brother, Kaneie, a grand counselor and right commander.
Outstripped at first, Kanemichi then leaped, past his brother,
to palace minister at full second rank and to appointment as private assessor.116
Startling though this promotion was, it paled beside Motomichi’s.
From second-rank captain, Motomichi passed straight over grand counselor
to regent. No one had ever heard the like before.
This Motomichi is the gentleman later known as Lord Fugenji.
The senior noble charged with arranging the announcement,
the presiding secretary, and even the clerk were plainly flabbergasted.
Chancellor Moronaga, now dismissed,
was sent off in exile to the east.
Caught up earlier, during Hgen,
by family guilt in his father’s fall—
the Haughty Left Minister, Yorinaga—
he had already been banished once,
he and three brothers; nor did his elder—
the right commander Kanenaga—
or the two younger—Takanaga,
a right captain, and Hanch, a monk—
ever again see the capital.
No, they died at their place of exile.
Nine springs and falls Moronaga spent
at Hata in the province of Tosa,
until, in the eighth month of Chkan 2, [1164]
he was called back and regained his rank.
In the first month of the following year,
he rose to second rank, senior grade,
and in Nin’an 1, the tenth month, [1167]
from the counselor he had once been
to supernumerary grand counselor.
No grand counselor post then being open,
an extra one was added for him.
Never before had there been six.
In fact, precisely that promotion,
from what he had been to what he became,
was unheard of, except in two cases:
Fujiwara no Mimori
and Minamoto no Takakuni.117
Moronaga, so skilled at music,
learned, and gifted at all the arts,
rose swiftly even to chancellor,
whereupon for some karmic misdeed
he was banished a second time:
of old, during Hgen, to Tosa
on the shores of the southern ocean
and now, in Jish, to the far east [1177–81]
and the province of Owari.
Any man who knows poignant beauty
longs to gaze, in all innocence,
on the moon of exile: Moronaga
never once contested his fate.
Bo Juyi of Tang, long ago,
although tutor to the crown prince,
tarried by the Xinyang River.
Moronaga recalled those days
while from the coast at Narumi
he surveyed ocean distances
illumined by a brilliant moon.
To the shore winds’ sighing, he sang,
plucked the biwa, gave voice to poems,
sagely passing the months and days.
Once he set off on pilgrimage
to Atsuta, the province’s third shrine.
That night, to entertain the god,
he played the biwa and sang verses,
but so benighted was the place
that no one there grasped the beauty of it.
The old men, the village women,
fishermen, farmers bowed their heads,
cocked their ears, but, low notes or high,
this scale or that meant nothing to them.
Even so, when Hu Ba played the kin,
the finny tribe leaped in joyous sport,
and the dust, when Yu Gong sang,
danced on the rafters. So it is
that wondrously perfected art
appeals to feeling beyond thought.
The hair rose upon every head,
and all present were enthralled.
By and by the night hour grew late.
The piece known as Fragrant Breeze
evoked the sweet smell of blossoms,
and in radiance Running Stream
vied with the moon high in the sky.
“I pray that profane letters practiced in this life
and the fault of frivolous words and fancy talk…”118
He sang these famous words and played
on the biwa such secret pieces
that emotion mastered the gods;
the sanctuary trembled and shook.
“But for these evil Heike deeds,
I could not have witnessed this wonder,”
he told himself, shedding heartfelt tears.
Minamoto no Suketoki, son of the inspector grand counselor Sukekata,
had been at once a captain in the Right Palace Guards and the governor of Sanuki;
he lost both posts. Fujiwara no Mitsuyoshi, consultant, intendant of the Left Watch,
and provisional master of the empress mother’s household, lost three.
So did Takashina no Yasutsune, until then lord of the Treasury,
Right City commissioner, and governor of the province of Iyo.
Likewise Fujiwara no Motochika, chamberlain, left minor controller,
and an officer of the empress’s household, lost all three posts.
The inspector grand counselor Sukekata, his son Suketoki,
and his grandson the left lieutenant Masakata, the three of them,
were ordered expelled forthwith from the capital.
Fujiwara no Sanekuni, a senior noble, and Nakahara no Norisada,
an officer in the police, were directed to execute the order.
They did so that very day.
“The three worlds are vast,” Sukekata said,
“but for the five feet of my body
they provide no space at all.
Life is indeed short, as they say,
but one day can seem very long.”
He stole from the palace by night
and started out for distant regions
beyond the many-layered clouds:
first toward eyama and Ikuno,
then on to pause at Murakumo,
in Tanba. But they found him at last
and drove him on, so the story goes,
to the distant province of Shinano.
17. Yukitaka
Among the housemen of Lord Motofusa, the former regent,
there was one e no Tnari, an officer in the police.
He was no favorite of the Heike either, and the news reached his ears
that a Rokuhara force was already on its way to seize him.
With his son Ienari, a junior officer in the Left Gate Watch,
he therefore fled with all possible speed, never mind where.
Up Mount Inari the two went and, at the summit, dismounted.
Father and son discussed what to do next.
“One possibility,” Tnari said, “would be to head for the east
and throw ourselves on the protection of Yoritomo,
that former officer of the Watch now exiled to Izu province.
Yoritomo, too, though, is under imperial ban,
and I doubt that by himself he could really do that much for us.
Is there after all in Japan a single estate that does not belong to the Heike?
No, there is no escape, and besides, it would be too embarrassing
to have strangers invade the home where we have lived so long.
Let us just go back again, then, and if the Rokuhara men are there,
we will slit our bellies and die. That is what we must do.”
They turned back and headed home to Kawarazaka.
Sure enough, three hundred Rokuhara riders in full armor,
led by Gendayū no Hangan Suesada and Settsu no Hangan Morizumi,
launched their attack with a mighty battle yell.
Tnari emerged on the veranda.
“Watch this, now, gentlemen!” he cried.
“Take the tale back to Rokuhara!”
He set fire to his mansion.
Father and son then slit their bellies
and burned to death in the flames.
So it was that many, high and low, came to grief. And why?
Because, they say, Lord Motomichi, the new regent,
and the third-rank captain Motoie, the former regent’s son,
had been locked in rivalry for the appointment.
Tnari and Ienari kill themselves in their burning house.
If so, then never mind the fate of a single regent, whatever it might be:
Did more than forty men really have to be done in just for that?
Despite Emperor Sutoku’s posthumous title the previous year,
despite the posthumous promotion of the Haughty Left Minister from Uji,
the world was still ill at ease, and more trouble seemed likely.
Talk spread that some demon had got into Lord Kiyomori.
He simply could not control his temper. For this reason
the whole capital trembled to think what affliction might yet strike the realm.
Now, there lived in those days a former minor controller, Yukitaka by name:
the eldest son of the late Nakayama counselor Lord Akitoki.
During the reign of Emperor Nij,
Yukitaka did quite well in office,
&nb
sp; but now, dismissed ten years ago,
he wore perforce, summer and winter,
the same clothes; nor did his meals
resemble at all what he wished.
There he was, hovering on the brink of final ruin, when a messenger from Lord Kiyomori delivered this: “I wish to speak to you. Come at once.”
Yukitaka was terrified. “I haven’t seen anyone who matters for over ten years!” he said. “Someone must have denounced me!” His wife and sons wept and wailed that some awful fate awaited him. However, messengers kept coming from Nishi-Hachij, and he could not refuse to go. He borrowed a carriage and set out.
To his amazement Lord Kiyomori came forward to greet him, and they talked. “Your father,” Kiyomori said, “was someone I consulted on matters great and small, and for that reason I hold you, too, in high regard. It has pained me that for years now you have been living in seclusion, but I had no control over His Cloistered Eminence’s policies. Enter my service, then. I will find you a suitable position. Very well, you may leave.” With this, Lord Kiyomori retired into an inner room.
When Yukitaka came home, his gentlewomen felt as though he had returned from the dead. They clustered around him and wept with joy.
Lord Kiyomori sent Gendayū no Hangan Suesada to him,
with titles to many estates that were now to be his.
Divining Yukitaka’s likely plight, Kiyomori presented him with one hundred rolls of silk,
one hundred taels of gold, and copious rice.
For the purposes of Yukitaka’s official service,
he also provided him with menservants, an ox driver, an ox, and a carriage.
Yukitaka, overjoyed, hardly knew what to do with himself.
“Am I dreaming, though?” he kept wondering. “Is this just a dream?”
On the seventeenth of the month, he was named a chamberlain with the fifth rank,
and he also regained his post of left minor controller.
This year was his fifty-first, and for once he grew visibly younger.
His prosperity seemed unlikely to last.
18. The Exile of the Cloistered Emperor
On the twentieth, an armed force surrounded the cloistered emperor’s Hjūji residence on all four sides.
Rumor had it that they meant to set fire to the building and burn everyone in it to death,
as Nobuyori had done during the Heiji years.
Gentlewomen and maids rushed out in panic, their heads still uncovered.
His Cloistered Eminence was dismayed.